Time Flies!
Wow! Where has the time gone? They say, Time flies when you’re having fun, or as Kermit the Frog once said, Time’s fun when you’re having flies. Perception of time is a really interesting thing! A kid is waiting for Christmas morning feels it will never get here and his parents are shocked that it is less than 6 months from now. When a student is in school at the start of a day or the start of a year, everything feels like it takes forever and the clock ticks slowly forward as she waits and waits and waits! And yet, when you look back at a situation it really doesn’t feel as long in your memory as it did when you were there like when parents look at how quickly their babies grew up!
Basically, I think that that the busier you are, the faster that time will feel like it passed. This isn’t too surprising. We all know that time flies when you’re having fun. I think it is because when we are engaged we don’t really notice the passage of time, so it feels like it passes quickly. When we are bored(which I think is a sign of a shallow mind and an ungodly trait….but don’t get me started on that!), there is not much to occupy our time, and we are much more likely to keep thinking about the time and check the clock, so time feels like it passes slowly.
I also think that when we look back on time periods, though, things reverse. When we think back on an interesting time that had lots of new experiences, we are able to retrieve a lot of events from memory; so, interesting time periods feel like they have taken a long time. A thirty year marriage doesn’t seem long enough since the years just flew by, and yet it was full of rich experiences and I cannot remember what it was like to not be married very well. On the flip side, the long days of waiting at the hospital, staring at the ceiling and waiting were so mindless and dull that they were excruciatingly slow at the time; but now I look back and realize Jim was not sick for very long before God took him home and I would take more of that “slow” time just to be with Jim.
I guess the mark of a successful life, then, is that the days have flown by, but the years feel long and full. All this verbage is to say that I can’t believe that summer is half over, that I have been at my new job for a month, and that it has been a whole year since I went to Panama City with my cousins. I could go on but that might bore you! 🙂